Lizard Limbs

Continuing from the previous post, calls for prosecution and consequences for criminal activities in the halls of power are mounting. In view of widespread, systemic rot that enables those in power to lie, cheat, and steal their way through life — largely at taxpayer expense (with forfeiture of souls of evildoers) — it could be that removing all those people to dull, gray, jail cells somewhere could cause catastrophic government failure (i.e., a failed state). If it’s a choice between full discovery and expulsion of criminals from government, destroying civil operations in the process of returning to the rule of law (was rule of law ever really true?) vs. letting supposedly important, indispensable people skate on their villainy because, like banks, they are deemed too big to fail, then I opt for rule of law across the board and say let chips fall where they may. Besides, the U.S. is already a failed state projecting a fading empire inside collapsing industrial civilization.

In the past couple decades, several instances of rampant, out-of-control behaviors among the power elite have emerged with all the expected negative downstream effects on American culture and polity. Two that come to mind immediately are the #MeToo movement (gawd I hate hashtags) and the casino economy that led to the 2008 financial crisis. In the case of the former, lots of bad actors (pun intended) were exposed and a few individuals were drawn in as collateral damage, but only a couple truly egregious offenders were sacrificed. One surmises, given decades during which the open secret of the casting couch was an easy mechanism of procurement, that other malefactors must certainly exist. Similarly, with banks and hedge funds waaaay over-leveraged in financial instruments that were designed for short-term profit leaving someone else holding the bag, only one high-profile fraud/cheater went to jail. The rest were infamously bailed out by U.S. taxpayers.

In nature, numerous organisms are known to sacrifice limbs (autotomy) during a predatory attack or self-amputate as a result of injury, which can grow back later (i.e., regenerate). This adaptive capacity is perhaps best know among reptiles but is also found with octopi, crabs, sea stars, and some insects. Not all can fully regenerate a lost limb.

So what do I expect to happen in the wake of the latest scandals? To save the spoils system, the power elite will designate a sacrificial lamb (or perhaps a few) and feed him or her (or them) to the wolves to sate the blood lust of the people. They are the limbs that can be sacrificed so that the larger organism can live to fight another day. Some argue that FDR saved capitalism in just this manner. Basically, the established pattern is a primary reason that bizarre segment of society is understood to be composed of lizard people.

Getting to Next Week

“There are decades where nothing happens and there are
weeks where decades happen.” ―Vladimir Ilyich Lenin

/rant on

How many times does a business announce its going-out-of-business sale is being extended? How ironic that a giant bolus of sales occurs just at the moment a business owner decides to call it quits and liquidate inventory only to postpone the final day because profits are rolling in at the eleventh hour. Suggests a mispricing problem, no? That’s just one relatively benign example of things happening at the eleventh hour that alter the landscape so fundamentally that a major course correction is required. Similar corrections are needed in response to revelations disclosed through a variety of media (often elided by mainstream news) nearly every day this year. No longer just the latest killing or military action, though those continue apace, now details of systemic rot provoke reconsideration of relationships between citizen and state, or alternatively, the 99% and the power elite. And it’s coming at everyone hard and fast.

From the beginning of public awareness of a huge, billowing column of smoke suggesting an inferno below (pick your catastrophe and/or conspiracy), I believed in a there there that power brokers (and their minions — lots of those) prefer to hide from view or at least explain away. The old bromide “move along, nothing to see” applies except that anyone with their eyes open can already see there is plenty to see. So much is coming to light in the past few days/weeks that I frankly can’t keep up. Data dumps and newly pubic records numbering in thousands the are out of scope for me, but crowdsourced investigations and analyses process the information with surprising celerity, causing many exposed parties to run for cover. (Resignations and decisions not to seek office don’t make scandals go away.) The pace and depth of discovery put me in mind of my 9-year-old blog post What Fresh New Hell? that decried my inability to process the daily news grind, to course correct my thinking in real time. Although I’m not part of the so-called precariat struggling with ongoing living expenses, I wonder if simply getting to next week in terms of news and/or opinion hasn’t also become a losing battle against the Red Queen Effect.

The worst revelations astound me. I simply can’t get my head around them and deposit them in the wooly-eyed category: too far beyond the pale to be plausible. Truly nasty, depraved events and people are scattered throughout history, but in the postwar period (i.e., since WWII), I had hoped that radically improved quality of life characterized by technological abundance and cessation of suffering would render craven jostling and criminality unnecessary. (Psychological burdens are paradoxically far greater than in the past.) Yet for charismatic psychopaths pushed to the acme of various hierarchies, the chase must never end. Turns out Whac-A-Mole isn’t just an arcade game for kids; it’s a distillation of an enduring part of human nature.

/rant off